I didn't know Cacani is able to do automatic inbetweens. All examples he showed looked pretty horrible, but I could imagine if you use it wisely it could be pretty pretty handy. Unfortunately such stuff only seems to work in vector graphics

schwarzgrau wrote:I didn't know Cacani is able to do automatic inbetweens. All examples he showed looked pretty horrible, but I could imagine if you use it wisely it could be pretty pretty handy. Unfortunately such stuff only seems to work in vector graphics

yeah you'd have to look past the artwork in the examples
but the potential of the technology is impressive, i like the interface for the spacing of the inbetweens.

I don't think it should be used for character animation. but as a tool for doing sfx i can see it being very powerfull.

Yeah absolutely. I've also used some twixtor in the short I'm currently working on, but not for character animation only for camera moves with static characters. In some shots the character looked kinda flat if I only sled them from left to right in a panning shot, so I drew them on the first frame of the pan and on the last frame before they left the frame (considering the parallax movement of arms, legs etc.). Then I used twixtor to morph between the two frames.
Sounds a bit like taking a sledgehammer to cracking a nut, but in some cases it really helped selling the shot.

I think I already talked about this software somewhere? Maybe not
Cacani is really clever especially for cleanup and inbeetweening (as long as you spend the time to understand how it works... There is a lot to think about while drawing to match the strokes and it can be confusing. TVP in definitely more intuitive as it's only drawing). It's still not that handy for animating, to me, but it makes me dream a little haha. Hope to be able to clean an anim with it someday. Also you can't really have something else that a vector line, maybe you can do something with it with some compositing but that's another drawback.

I would use it more like something to assist me whil I inbeetween then redraw/transform everything to find my arcs and drawing again (note that there is a nice system to inbeetween with arcs, and with the time charts it's not just linear inbeetweens). But it's a really bad learning tool if you wan't to learn animation.

I use twixtor for slow animations with a lot of inbeetweens, but only if the frames are pretty similar (I've even spotted it used in some Avatar shots haha, so it's happening in production also). I found that the other functions of the plugin are not that usefull for animation. But I would like to see a twixtor-like function in TVPaint, as it can be usefull for a lot of speed effects.

But I would definitely use cacani for some cleanup and inbeetweens as the cleanup tools are great and you can still animate a lot by yourself if you like full anim. They used similar techniques with after effect puppets at dreamworks on the kung fu panda 2D part, as long as it's well animated the tools can let you save a lot of time. But animation was still done on paper by james baxter, knowing what are the keyframes painted and textures in photoshop and what should be interpolated.

Storyboard, animation and design work : http://nathanotano.tumblr.com/
As I'm highly interested in animation workflows, I'm open to scripting new TVP functions for individuals and studios. Please don't hesitate to contact me!

I didn't know Cacani is able to do automatic inbetweens. All examples he showed looked pretty horrible, but I could imagine if you use it wisely it could be pretty pretty handy. Unfortunately such stuff only seems to work in vector graphics

Perhaps there could be a different software or a TVP plugin that can make it work with raster graphics.